Before It’s NewsA shocking 65% of For-Profit Prison Contracts Include “Lockup Quotas” and “Low-Crime Taxes” to Guarantee Profits.
Public Interest reports expose contract language guaranteeing 80-100 percent prison occupancy and forcing taxpayers to pay a penalty for empty beds.
Today U.S. Prisons are home to 5% of the world’s population. USA also has the highest rate of youth imprisoned and on any given day there are more than 70,000 youths in detention. And who is the biggest winners of this mass incarceration? The for-profit prison companies whose business models essentially depend on locking more and more people up.
As one example, The Biggest Baddest Profiteer of them all — The Corrections Corporation of America opened its first immigration detention center in a renovated motel in Houston nearly 30 years ago and now leads the nation’s for-profit prison industry, generating billions of dollars in revenue for housing prisoners, most of whom are Black and Hispanic.
All private prison companies have corrupting incentives. One is to save money by cutting corners. Another is to promote their bottom line even when that’s not the best means to securing public safety, taxpayer value, fairness, and justice. Although CCA isn’t the only company with these incentives, it has done more than any other corporation to grow the private prison industry into a behemoth plagued by abuse and neglect and profiting off our nation’s over-reliance on incarceration. [Continue ]
The Biggest Prison Profiteer Of Them All
Private prisons: How US corporations make money out of locking you up